Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin provided the most widely used definition of arms control in their seminal book, Strategy and Arms Control (1961): We believe that arms control is a promising, but still only dimly perceived, enlargement on the scope of military strategy. It rests essentially on the recognition that our military relation with potential …
Dead Hand, START and Strategy Stability
by | 2009-10-07 | 14 Comments
Last week, the Senate Republican Policy Committee released this execrable document, START: Do Time Extension Instead of a Bad Treaty, on the New START treaty. Today, I finagled a copy of a memo that Senator Kyl’s staff has distrubuted in advance of a briefing that Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller will give to the Senate National …
Fun with Molybdenum
by | 2009-10-07 | 10 Comments
Molybdenum seems to be something that just won’t go away! Most people feel it is one of the reasons Iran appears willing to ship its indigenously enriched LEU first to France to be further purified and then to Russia to be enriched to the 19.75% U235 the TRR now uses. (See the latest ISIS technical …
TRR Tradeoffs
by | 2009-10-06 | 7 Comments
The immediate advantages of last week’s agreement-in-principle between Iran and the P5+1 / E3+3 are pretty clear. Iran gets about five years’ worth of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). And removing 1,200 kg of Iran’s LEU and returning it as fuel takes away the much-discussed breakout option for the near term, as James …
